From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Words of Wisdom for 2015 Grads
"You're stepping into a world that's, well, pretty rough. It's pretty chaotic, pretty divisive. You've got climate change, you've got debt, you've got wars, you've got political paralysis. It's kind of a grim story. But the story, I think, can be retold. And I really believe that you're the ones to do it."
---Robert Redford, Colby College
"I’m here to tell you that activist is not a dirty word. And I’m here to tell your parents that, as well. I didn’t expect to be an activist---I sort of stumbled up on it because, in the words of Larry Kramer, one of the AIDS activists and a mentor of mine, you have to fight for what you love."
---Mark Ruffalo, Dickinson College
"While you’re on Mars, stroll by the Spirit, Opportunity, or Curiosity Mars rovers. Each is fitted with a photometric calibration target, a small sundial that serves as a test pattern for their cameras. Look closely. Engraved on each are these words: 'To those who visit here, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.' The joy of knowing: that’s science. That’s what drives us. It brings out the best in us and makes our species worthy of the future."
---Bill Nye, Rutgers
"A new door is opening for you---a door to a lifetime of rejection. It's inevitable. How do you cope? I hear that Valium and Vicodin work."
---Robert DeNiro, NYU's Tisch School of
the Arts
"Hold on to your old friends. Kiss your Mama. Admit what your dreams are. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t know what you’re gonna do tomorrow. But work hard and don’t be lazy. And put away your damn phone once in a while. And be nice to jerks because we still don’t know the criteria for getting into heaven yet."
---Maya Rudolph, Tulane
"if you think today’s gridlock is bad, let me remind you that it was a good century between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. And of all the women at the Seneca Falls women’s suffrage convention in 1848, just one lived to see women cast their votes. Just one. But these folks didn’t let the ugliness and the obstacles deter them."
---Michelle Obama, Oberlin
"Any standards worth having will be a challenge to meet. And most of the time, you will fall short. But what is nice about having your own set of standards is that from now on, you fill out your own report card. So do yourself a favor: be an easy grader. Score yourself on a curve. Give yourself extra credit. You have the power. You are your own professor now. Which I know is a little creepy because that means you’re showering with your professor. But you have tenure. They can’t fire you."
---Stephen Colbert, Wake Forest University
Congrats and happy world changing!
Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, 29, 2015
Note: If you have a corrupt FIFA executive, leave a corrupt FIFA executive. If you need a corrupt FIFA executive, take a corrupt FIFA executive. ---Corrupt Mgt.
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7 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the Justice Department argues its appeal of the decision refusing to allow implementation of President Obama's immigration executive order:
38
Days 'til the
Red Earth Native American Cultural Festival in Oklahoma City:
7
Temperature reached in India earlier this week during the heat wave there that has killed 1,700 people:
118°
Percent chance the Iraqi army has lost the will to fight:
100%
(Source: Secretary of Defense Ash Carter)
Percent chance the Iraqi army has lost the will to fight:
0%
(Source: Vice President Joe Biden)
Decline in the consumption of beef over the last three decades:
28%
(Source: FiveThirtyEight)
Amount of the marriage bonus members of ISIS get to "start on a new home, a family and a honeymoon:
$1,500
(Source: AP)
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Puppy Pic of the Day: But only two, because four would be ostentatious.
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This 2006 image seems appropriate
today: Hastert answering reporters'
questions in front of a graveyard.
JEERS to a jerk I hoped I'd heard the last of. The banksters and the war criminals may go free, but at least the Justice Department
bagged a former Republican House speaker yesterday. Dennis Hastert is charged with covering up regular $100,000 payments to a mystery "Person A," apparently to keep something hushed-up. The surprise indictment adds to Hastert's
lengthy list of scandals. So to recap: in the last 20 years we've had three Republican House Speakers: Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer who resigned after being reprimanded and fined by his House colleagues…Hastert, a federally-indicted creep who said New Orleans was crazy for wanting to rebuild after hurricane Katrina and tried to hush up the 2006 Mark Foley congressional page sexting scandal…and John Boehner, the chain-smoking tanaholic who is so ineffective he can't even control the chamber's thermostat without help from Democrats. Memo to Nancy Pelosi: would you like your future statue on the National Mall to be bronze or marble?
CHEERS to Ol' Marble Butt. On May 30, 1922---eight years after construction began and nine years after the original chocolate one melted---the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in Washington, and immediately classed up the joint by 800 percent:
Putting Abe together.
Lincoln's statue was sculpted by Daniel Chester French (1850-1931); plaster casts of Lincoln's hands and face were used to make the statue.
The statue is over 3 times actual size; if the statue could stand up, it would be 28 feet tall. The murals were done by Jules Guerin. The 36 Doric columns represent the 36 states of the Union at the time of President Lincoln's death in 1865.
You can go all panoramic at the very cool
National Park Service site. Honest Abe weighs an astonishing 120 tons. It'd be a lot less if you tourists would quit feeding him chili dogs.
JEERS to turbulent times ahead. Enjoy the next 52 hours, all you gulf- and east-coasters. Hurricane season starts Monday. But the good news is that the NOAA forecast ain't too bad at all:
You can prepare for hurricane season by looking
at this and yelling "Holy shit!" over and over.
NOAA's 2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook indicates that a below-normal hurricane season is most likely this year. The outlook calls for a 70% chance of a below-normal season, a 20% chance of a near-normal season, and only a 10% chance of an above-normal season. See NOAA definitions of above-, near-, and below-normal seasons. The Atlantic hurricane region includes the North Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. The main climate factor expected to suppress this hurricane season is
El Niño, which is now present and is expected to last through the season.
We estimate a 70% probability for: 6-11 Named Storms (which includes TS Ana that formed in May), 3-6 Hurricanes and [up to] 2 Major Hurricanes.
As a reminder,
here are the names associated with the Hurricane Class of 2015 in an easy-to-remember format: Ana conda, Bill Nye, Claudette Colbert, Danny Boy,
All My Children's Erika Kane, Fred Flintstone, Grace of Monaco, Henri Matisse, Ida Lupino, Joaquin Phoenix, Kate Hudson, Larry from the Three Stooges,
Mork and Mindy's Mindy, Tsar Nicholas, a female love poem is called an Odette, Peter Peter pumpkin eater, Rose Kennedy, Sam I Am, Mother Teresa, RCA Victor, and Wanda Sykes. If the last two letters of the alphabet are needed, NOAA will use the usual "You've Gotta Be Shitting Me, Another One???" and "Zombie Hurricane Season from Hell!"
CHEERS to affairs of states. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the 13th original colony to ratify the U.S. Constitution. And on May 29, 1848, Wisconsin became the 30th state to become "one of U.S." (See what I did there? Huh Huh?) In the C&J cafeteria tonight, the best of both: hot wieners with cheese, snail salad with cheese, jonnycakes with cheese, and coffee milk with cheese. Please add 50 cents for extra cheese.
Not the winner.
CHEERS to draining the dictionary. Congratulations to co-champs Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam (the right-wingers are gonna have a field day with those names) of Kansas and Missouri, who were the last contestants standing at the
National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. It's the second tie in two years. The winning words---which my spellchecker flagged with the message, "You're drunk again, aren't you?"---were: "scherenschnitte" and "nunatak." Coincidentally, both share a common definition: the sound you make right before someone says "gesundheit."
CHEERS to the end of and era. Did you know that today is technically a holiday? Yup…it's "End of the Middle Ages Day." To mark the occasion, all GOP flag pins were lowered to half-lapel.
CHEERS to home vegetation. Not a whole lot going on in TV World this weekend, so here's a quick text box with the essentials:
Sports:
Major League Baseball
Stanley Cup playoffs.
Byron Nelson golf tourney
Sunday on MTP: Bernie!
DVDs:
The Seventh Son, The Loft and more.
Sunday morning lineup:
Meet the Press: Bernie!!! Plus John Kasich and Google Santorum.
This Week: Martin O'Malley, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson.
Face the Nation: Jeb Bush; CIA director John Brennan; Bob Schieffer bids farewell.
CNN's State of the Union: No idea. Martians?
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: Carly Fiorina and former CIA head Gen. Michael Hayden
And here's your Sunday night
Game of Thrones SPOILER ALERT: Hilarity ensues when the Lannisters inadvertently go on a surfer vacation in Hawaii the
same week as the Starks and discover the hotel has booked both families
in the same room and it's the last available room on the entire island!!! Happy viewing, dude.
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Ten years ago in C&J: May 29, 2005
JEERS to phony baloneys. Afghan president Hamid Karzai and George W. Bush staged a 'press availability' Monday at the White House. The problem: the press didn't bother to show up because of limited questions and evasive answers. The solution: fill the room with White House interns. The saddest part is that no one could tell the difference.
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And just one more…
Michael and me in 1993...
CHEERS to My Cutie. Tomorrow my partner Michael and I celebrate another trip (#22) around the sun together. He asked me out on my first-ever date (he was very insistent, so I guess you could say it was a "mandate"---
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!) on May 30, 1993. To put that in perspective, we met during Bill Clinton's fifth month in office. And here we are, grayer and crankier but still reasonable approximations of our younger selves, as Barack Obama sprints toward the finish line of his second term. What's the secret to our longevity, you ask? I think it boils down to three things: love, shared responsibility, and accepting the fact that neither of us hears half of what the other one says. But that's okay---we're quite smooth at the art of "yupping" and we fill in the blanks by texting each other from our respective ends of the couch.
...and this morning.
In a tradition I started a few years back, here's the annual posting of a smug snippet from "The new apostle of sanity in sex," David Reuben, M.D. Forty-six years ago, in 1969, his mega-seller
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask---a copy of which I once found in my grandparents' attic---was published and treated as gospel (in fairness, he later took a chill pill and lightened up on us):
What about all the homosexuals who live together happily for years?
What about them? They are mighty rare birds among the homosexual flock. Moreover, the "happy" part remains to be seen. The bitterest argument between husband and wife is a passionate love sonnet by comparison with a dialogue between a butch and his queen. Live together? Yes. Happily? Hardly.
For the record, in our household the proper pecking order endures: the cat's the queen, the dog's the butch, and Michael and I are their humble servants. Scandalous, I know. I hope the republic survives.
Have a great weekend! Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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